Our very own Flournoy Henry recently contributed to a new IBM Redbook: “Scaling BPM Adoption from Project to Program with IBM Business Process Manager” :

Your first Business Process Management (BPM) project is a crucial first step on your BPM journey. It is important to begin this journey with a philosophy of change that will enable you to avoid common pitfalls that lead to failed BPM projects, and ultimately, poor BPM adoption. This IBM® Redbooks® publication describes the methodology and best practices that lead to a successful project and how to use that success to scale to enterprise-wide BPM adoption.

The intended audience for this book includes all people who participate in the discovery, planning, delivery, deployment, and continuous improvement activities for a business process. These roles include process owners, process participants and subject matter experts (SMEs) from the operational business as well as technologists responsible for delivery including BPM analysts, BPM solution architects, BPM administrators, and BPM developers.

PDF and HTML versions are available (I recommend PDF version, it is just easier to read because some of the sections are short but flow well together).

This is just part of our (and Flournoy’s) commitment to give back to the BPM community we are a part of.  But it wouldn’t be possible without some of the folks at IBM organizing and bringing a group of experts together to do it.  Congrats to Flournoy, Lisa, Ines, Fahad, Wim, Jonas, and Duan for producing this (RedBooks are team effort).  Hopefully we’ll be able to participate in more Redbooks in the BPM space in the future.

Not too long ago we were talking with an insurance company about claims processing and BPM.  Flournoy Henry, with years of experience in the Insurance business, thought he’d share a little bit of our perspective on the topic of BPM in Insurance:

When it comes to insurance, Claims Processing is the life blood of a successful insurance company, second only to policy sales. Unlike product sales or other service industries, insurance companies sell a promise; a promise that when needed, your policy will pay out. If a claim is not processed accurately in a timely manner, that promise is unfulfilled – customers lose faith in that promise and new policy sales suffer accordingly. With a growing number of insurance variations and increased regulation concerns, claims processing often becomes overly complicated and difficult for the insurance company to manage. However, with a disciplined approach to process management and greater visibility into operations, these same companies can turn a difficult situation into a competitive advantage.

When policy sales increase, claims demand follows suit. To keep up, either hire more staff or innovate; it’s just that simple. An obvious choice for innovation is automation; thereby processing more numbers with the same or fewer people. However, what should be automated? What step in the process is most valuable or time consuming? What decision points seem to change most often and require better management? Without the proper visibility into the claims process, we can’t answer these questions with any certainty. And when customers depend on your choices, and your investment dollars are at stake, certainty counts.

In addition to automation opportunities, workload distribution is often an overlooked drain on your company’s ability to execute. Many companies have higher waged Supervisors and Managers spending time dredging through spreadsheets, stacks of work, and outdated reports only to make a decision of who should work a claim. This is not only a misuse of your staff, but a costly choke point in your process. With an enlightened view of your process and real-time feedback metrics, these choke points can often be eliminated to greatly improve the performance of your overall process.

Regulatory constraints are an unavoidable and costly nuisance for almost any insurance process. With each state variation and federal release, are you spending the project budget re-writing applications to handle these revolving issues? Can your claims process adapt quickly and respond to new constraints?

With increased process visibility and performance comes control. The ability to analyze risk, understand your impact, and react quickly to a changing market and increased regulatory concerns will not only keep your policies selling; but will reduce your cost of ownership and increase your profitability.

Recently, Flournoy Henry joined the BP3 team. Flournoy is an 18-year veteran from Aflac, where he was deeply involved in the business and information technology of the insurance business. In his last four years, he has been a BPM catalyst at Aflac. He led six major BPM process implementations and numerous major enhancements to each of those initiatives. Flournoy ran the technical evaluation of BPM software at Aflac, and then became the chief practitioner of BPM software there.

As an early adopter of Lombardi’s Teamworks®, Flournoy has been a leading voice (literally) in the BPM community by speaking at every Lombardi customer conference, speaking at Forrester and Gartner conferences, and participating in the community by providing the benefit of his experience and philosophy. If you’re a Lombardi customer, or a BPM follower, you probably know who Flournoy is.

Mr. Henry will be taking the lead on customer projects on behalf of BP3, leveraging his Lombardi Teamworks expertise and his industry knowledge to provide a great value for our customers. But most of all, we’re giving him the chance to paint on a bigger canvas – to evangelize, to help shape strategy and culture around providing value for the business first, and to craft the technology strategy to support the business goals.

Hope you’ll join us in welcoming Flournoy to the team!